Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Openbox, the lazy way...

I have recently switched over to OpenBox because I just had enough of random KDE bugs, especially with regards to plasma eating 99% of the CPU, and so far I'm very, very pleased with the result.

For the uninitiated out there, there is one thing you have to remember is that people think you know everything to know about coding and scripting once you tackle a more "advanced" window manager, so be prepared for hours of frustration while trying to figure out the smallest detail. Take heart though, someone like you have gone through it before and is willing to share his knowledge.

To me the main problem with Fluxbox, Openbox and all the other *box window managers is that they are not geared for the person who has productivity as a high priority. As an office worker you do not have time to call up a terminal type out the command for OpenOffice Writer.You want to browse a file in a file manager, click on it and let the rest just happen.

That is why, after this long silence, I'm going to blog my progress and what I did to make OpenBox as "office friendly" as one can get.Each post will be a different feature to make it easy to follow and reproduce without reading stuff that doesn't concern you at that time.

Just a few notes before I get started:I'm not going to handle the installation of all the various software. I'm using Arch Linux and have no idea what some of the software are named and how they are installed on other distros.Use Google for that, if you want to know how to install Avant Window Navigator on Ubuntu then search for:"Avant Window Navigator"+Ubuntu+install

This goes for all other software as well.

If you have questions, ask!I will answer whatever problems you have, so fire away!